


Five Minutes

by 401



Series: Fixing Winter [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Anger, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-19
Updated: 2015-07-19
Packaged: 2018-04-10 02:51:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4374344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/401/pseuds/401
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After being apprehended by SHIELD, the Winter Soldier is in a state of shock and distress. It is down to Steve Rogers to remind him that he does not have to fight anymore. The first part of my 'Fixing Winter' series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Minutes

**Author's Note:**

> The first part of my Fixing Winter series.

Five Minutes

Steve Rogers sat outside of the secured suite that had been assigned to the containment initiative that had been put in place as soon as the Winter Soldier had been captured. Nicholas Fury stood opposite him, hands clasped behind his back, which faced the Captain as a plain reminder of the status of his decision.

“I just want to talk to him,” Steve pleaded, his voice was monotone and defeated.

He was tired. Tired from hours awake guarding that room, unable to block out the sound of Bucky’s attacks of rage and fear from being held in the cell and tired of pleading with Fury for something that he felt he deserved. It had been decades since he had last seen Buck, and he was not ready to let him go again.

“I cannot do that, Captain,” Fury sighed, unmoving.  
“It could distress him further”- there was a loud slam against the armoured door followed by a sob of frustration- “And I don’t know how long his bones are going to hold out.”

Steve stood up. His head swam and his ears buzzed.

“Or it could make him remember who he is.”

Fury crossed the distance between them in a few of his usual smooth paces. He placed his hands on Steve’s shoulders in a way that both calmed and vexed him. The fact that Fury thought that he could calm him down, when the prospect of the first person he had truly loved seeing him as nothing but another mission, another hit on the list pushed into his hands by Hydra, made Steve’s cheeks flame up with anger.

“Who he was, Captain,” Fury corrected.

Steve stared with a tense jaw, waiting.

“James Barnes is not in that room, Steve. ‘Bucky’ is not in that room,” Fury continued. He looked into Steve’s eyes with pity and urgency.

“The Winter Soldier is in that room, and he wants to kill Captain America. I can’t trust you to stop him,” he said, pressing his fingers to Steve’s chest.

Rogers pushed the hand off. Tears burned his eyes and ached in his throat but he concealed them by furrowing his brow. Not well enough.

“Five minutes, Rogers,” Fury finally relented, looking at the door.

Steve breathed a ‘thank you’ and went to press the release button on the door, but paused with a hovering hand.  
These doors let out a burst of current that would immobilise and stun the person inside the room to give the person entering enough time to arm themselves adequately. Dr Banner had developed them to protect others from, well from himself. They were designed for the Hulk but were now being used to keep Bucky from throttling anyone who went anywhere near him. Steve could not press that button,

Fury nodded in understanding, seeing the Captain’s indecision. Steve turned away and listened with sweaty palms and sick feeling as the crackling of God knows how many volts of electricity pierced the silence. Bucky whimpered from the other side of the door, then the room was still. An electronic voice told Steve that he could enter.

He walked into utter disarray. Bucky was lying on the floor, still rendered immobile by the shocker door. Around him were upturned chairs and a table that had been beaten beyond salvation. The remains of handcuffs used to restrain him and an upset jug of water lay there too.

Steve approached slowly and sat down on the floor next to Barnes’ head. He saw a bolt of paralysed anger course through the man’s features. He trembled, battling with his new disarmed state fruitlessly.

“I’m sorry, Buck,” Steve whispered, “I’m so sorry.”

He placed a shaky hand on Bucky’s forehead and pushed the damp, dark hair back and out of his eyes. The soldier stared up at him with wide doe eyes, full of fear. There was a scream writhing in his throat but his jaws were still locked tight from the current.

“Please try and remember.”

Bucky started to loosen, his metal arm, that fucking monstrosity that Steve wanted to tear apart popped and flexed with hot blue flashes until he could move. He did not fight. That was progress.  
He just stared up at Steve, eyes coarse with the horror and distress that had been fixed on his face since his capture four days previously. He had not slept or eaten anything. The industrial doses of Valium pumped into him to calm him down made him vomit so he had started resisting taking it with all of his strength. They had tried gases of vaporised tranquilizers injected into the room but the serum in his blood, that same serum that was in the Captain, gave him the strength and willpower to hold his breath until the mist had settled. It just made him drowsy and irritable. The walls were now scarred with deep gouges from him catching himself from toppling with his metal hand.  
Bucky’s stare intensified, crinkling at the edges until he gave up. He was trying but the images of the mission from Hydra and his frustration at the vague memories that passed through his grip every three seconds were too distracting. He hated that man he was staring up at because he thought he was supposed to. He hated him because his face was so familiar that Bucky questioned if that was really true. He lunged at Steve but his reflexes were slow and hazed by exhaustion. Rogers pulled him into his arms and squeezed.  
Bucky squirmed against the embrace, throwing punch after punch into the Captain’s ribs.

“I know, I know,” Steve soothed, holding Barnes a little tighter. The Winter Soldier coughed out tears, exhausted and defeated.

Steve ran his hands over Bucky’s back. On the right hand side, there was that unfamiliar metal arm, cold and unyielding. But on the other side, there was something familiar. Warm and vulnerable. The arm that Steve had rested his head on to cry and laugh many times before. It was an arm that Steve had pulled back from danger and toward passion. It felt strange that it was attached to someone so distant and broken, someone that barely remember him even though he had shared the most important parts of his life with that man. They had argued and played cards and talked about rent and heating bills, all of the ‘normal’ that Steve craved. They had danced around their tiny Brooklyn apartment. They had danced.

“No, no listen!” Steve fumbled through his pockets, excited at the only new idea to get through to Bucky that he’d had in days.

He pulled out his iPhone and tackled the technology slowly and clumsily until he found the music file.  
Scrolling with uneasy fingers he locked onto his target: ‘You Always Hurt the One You Love’ by the Mills Brothers.  
It had come out the year he had lost Bucky and they had danced for hours to this. It had been the one song Steve had owned on vinyl. It could work.  
He pressed the play button, Bucky flinched into the Captain’s neck at the unexpected sound but Steve rocked him to the beat of the music. He remembered what it felt like, turning in circles through their living room, their bare feet bumping in drunken discoordination. He had not been used to his new, bigger frame then, so his broad shoulders would bump shelves and walls. He had knocked a glass of beer onto Bucky’s toes and broken them once. Buck’s hands would automatically lift from Cap’s waist to guide him from furniture and they would lean into the heady warmth and darkness of each other’s necks and smile. The war hadn’t existed when they were like that. 

Steve’s mind was so occupied by his own memories that he did not register the quiet sound, warm and soft into his shoulder.  
At first he though Bucky was mumbling his name. Bucky did that a lot. He would rock back and forth, pace the room, repeating ‘James Buchanan Barnes’ over and over in an attempt to remember himself. That was not happening now. He was singing.

“You always hurt the one you love,” Bucky mumbled, “The one you shouldn’t hurt at all.”

Bucky’s voice broke and he coughed. Steve took over, his own voice not much better, not through exhaustion but with tears.

“You always take the sweetest rose, and crush it till’ the petals fall,” Steve whispered along to the music.  
Bucky lifted his head but it wobbled and fell back to Steve’s shoulder.

“You always break the kindest heart with a hasty word you can’t recall,” Bucky continued, even quieter now with his chest rising and falling hard with the effort.  
Steve pressed his lips against Bucky’s temple. It was damp with sweat and boiling hot.

“So if I broke your heart last night, it’s because I love you most of all,” Steve finished the song with his face buried into James’ neck. He didn’t care if he punched him; he wouldn’t have felt it.

Steve kept rocking the soldier in his lap until his breathing, and his own, had slowed to a few occasional shudders, like a child recovering from a tantrum.  
The Captain pulled Bucky into a bridal carry and put him down on the camp bed in the corner of the room.  
“I’m sorry, Stevie,” Bucky said slowly, hoarse and cloudy with fatigue and emotion.

Roger’s nearly choked at the sound of his old abandoned pet name.  
He bent down and kissed Bucky. His lips tasted salty with tears. A buzzing came through on the radio at his hip.  
“Five minutes is up, Captain.” It was Fury.  
Steve Rogers nodded. That was okay.  
Five minutes was all that he had needed.


End file.
